Don't Freak Out, But Chances Are You Know a Few Sociopaths

We talk to author M.E Thomas about her gripping new book, Confessions of a Sociopath.

On the surface, M.E. Thomas appears much like any successful young professional. A pretty woman in her early thirties, she's an accomplished attorney and law professor with a loving family and friends who teaches Sunday school and donates 10 percent of her income to charity. But she also has a scary side, detailed in her gripping new book, Confessions of a Sociopath. We pulled some of the most intriguing passages and asked her to elaborate on exactly what's going on in her head.

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***

People often say, in explaining their horrible actions, that they "just snapped." I know that feeling well. Once, a metro worker tried to shame me about using an escalator that was closed. I stood there, letting my rage reach that decision-making part of my brain, and became filled with a sense of calm purpose. I blinked my eyes and set my jaw. I started following him. Adrenaline started flowing. My mouth tasted metallic. I was hoping that he would walk into some deserted hallway where I would find him alone. An image sprang to my mind of my hands wrapped around his neck, my thumbs digging deeply into his throat, his life slipping away from him under my unrelenting grasp. How right that would feel.

"Everyone experiences fight or flight reactions, sometimes in response to trivial actions—for example, people who have killed someone due to road rage. No one has flawless emotional regulation. In this particular instance, I was annoyed from all of the traveling inconveniences I had been experiencing, and the metro worker's response was overly aggressive (yelling at me and making a big deal out of nothing), which I believe triggered my own overreaction. I snapped out of it relatively quickly."

***

If my life were a television show it would start like this: A young woman sees something moving in the pool—a baby opossum that must have fallen in. The baby's muscles quake with exhaustion; it is on the brink of succumbing to fatigue. The young woman grabs a net and drags the opossum under. The animal struggles loudly, whimpering and squealing, until it manages to get free. But it's barely able to gasp a breath before the net comes down again.

"I could see no benefit in saving the opossum (Would it even survive without its mother? It looked like it was almost dead anyway.). Plus, there was some small chance of harm (Would it try to bite me? Did it have rabies?). Because the expected costs seemed to exceed the benefits, I determined that it would be best if I fished it out of the pool dead."

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***

You would like me if you met me. I have the kind of smile that is common among television show characters: perfect in its sparkly-teeth dimensions and ability to express pleasant invitation. I'm the sort of date a man would love bring to his ex's wedding: Fun, exciting, the perfect office escort. And I'm just the right amount of smart and successful that his parents would be thrilled if he brought me home.

"One of the main reasons why I wrote the book was to correct misconceptions about sociopaths. Since 1 in 25 people are sociopaths, statistically everyone has interacted with one, probably without knowing it. This suggests that most interactions people have with us are either positive or neutral, or at least not outside the norm in the negative. The stigma against sociopaths is just that—stigma, without much science to back it up. Although it is true that some of us do very bad things, the majority are living successful lives in society with careers and loved ones."

***

Sometimes it feels like I am in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and any slipup or indication that I am different will draw suspicion. I mimic the way other people interact with others, not to trick them, but so I can hide among them.

"I pretend to like people's dogs, even though I don't. I coo at their babies. We all do this to a certain extent, put on a veneer of pleasantness even if we don't happen to be in a pleasant mood. When someone asks how we are, we reply, 'fine, thank you.' We do not overshare about our problems. Everyone pretends to fit in more than they do. If you don't conform, people tend to consider you a threat and may respond accordingly, as the citizens of Salem did during their witch trials. I now want to be more open about who I am. I wrote the book knowing that the people that know me would be able to identify me and hopefully understand a little more about what it is like to live the way I do so I could be more authentic with them."

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***

I've always loved to bike in cities, partly because it's so dangerous. If a car starts creeping into my lane, I will punch at it or use my portable tire pump to swing at it. If a car cuts me off, I will follow it until I catch up, then dart in front and come to a skidding halt, forcing them to slam on their brakes. I'm sure it's incredibly dangerous to do this, and really only for me, but it also freaks the hell out of them.

"It's a way to be explicitly aggressive in a relatively socially sanctioned way (the way it is okay to be aggressive in contact sports). In my mind, traffic conditions mean that I'm competing with drivers for road space. I enjoy being pitted against people in honest and open competition. It puts my mind into overdrive trying to strategize the best way to gain an advantage or avoid an incursion into my space."

***

Growing up, I didn't like to be touched and rejected affection. The only physical contact I craved entailed violence. The father of one of my best friends in grade school had to sternly ask me to stop beating his daughter. I didn't know that what I was doing was bad. It didn't even occur to me that it would hurt her or that she might not like it.

"If someone hugged me, I got stiff. It felt too soft. I preferred the straightforwardness and showcasing of power that characterize roughhousing. Eventually I learned to appreciate hugs, but I had to try to like them, similar to how people develop a taste for unusual foods. I thought beating up my friend was the sort of roughhousing that was commonly practiced amongst my male friends or between athletes to show camaraderie."

***

As a child, when someone invoked my wrath, my eyes turned into dark simmering pools, the roiling of revenge plots apparent just below the surface. I tilted my head forward, my hands curled into fists and my eyes narrowed, as if to focus all my malignant energy on my antagonist for optimum destruction. I glowered like villains do in the movies, shattering the illusion of normalcy I tried so hard to protect.

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"I think children naturally get mad at things that are beyond their control. One difference with me was that I believed it was possible to strike back effectively (and was very creative about strategizing possible ways), so I had a confidence and sense of purpose in my anger that I think most children lack."

***

When my good friend's father was diagnosed with cancer, I cut off all contact with her. I could no longer enjoy any of the benefits she had provided me—superior advice, interesting conversation—because she was horrible to be around most of the time. I had overinvested and was running many months into the red with no improvement.

"My friend was a drain. The more I was around her, the more drained I became, and as a result I behaved poorly around her. It was a downward spiral and it was efficient for both of us for me to just walk away."

***

People take for granted the empathy with which they were born, and the morality that they internalize. Crying when someone you love cries—I was not born with this shortcut into the hearts of others. Feeling guilt when you hurt someone you love is an internal safeguard to prevent you from losing them, but I have never been able to learn it.

"I do feel a lot of things, particularly primitive emotions like anger, joy, etc. I think that the main difference between the way I process emotions and the way other people do is that my emotions don't have the same meaning to me. They don't necessarily reflect who I think I am as a person. I feel them the same way I would feel hunger or exhaustion—I know they're happening and why, but I don't feel like they represent any truths or values about myself."

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***

I insert myself into a person's psyche and quietly wreak as much havoc as I can. To indulge in malignity. To terrorize a person's soul. There is a special pleasure in destruction because of its rarity—like dissolving a pearl in champagne. If you've ever had an impulse to tell your best friend that yes, those pants do make her look fat, you understand how liberating it is to unrestrainedly lash out at another's softest parts.

"I don't actually destroy people, I just cultivate power. Sometimes I cultivate creative power, sometimes destructive power. I rarely actually exercise the power because I haven't had to and there are frequently large negative consequences. It is enough to know I can."

***

It wouldn't have mattered to me in the slightest if he dropped dead the moment we stopped kissing. If a gang of teenagers had appeared to kick in his organs and slash his throat, I would have stood by to watch in order to enjoy the enthralling violence of it. If I had not been a young girl with a future to lose, I might have joined them so that I too could feel the satisfaction of his bones cracking and muscles bruising from my blows, these human parts I had caressed only moments ago.

"I appreciate violence for the aesthetic expression that it is. I can't be alone in this. Even when you eliminate the entire horror genre, movies and television shows often depict and even glorify violence. I think people find it titillating, to be vicariously confronted with their mortality."

***

One night, I strangled my date. We had talked before about sexual domination, and so I felt I had implicit permission to bruise and strike. I slapped hard across her face so that I could feel the memory of high, sharp cheekbone on the palm of my hand for several seconds afterward. I could get my hands around her neck with amazing ease. I might have killed her if I thought there would have been no consequences. I have strong fingers. They are adept at applying equal amounts of steadily increasing pressure, so that the sensation one has under their grasp is of an unstoppable mechanism without regard for the thing inside it.

"The interplay of sexuality and violence appeals to me because they both involve an intimate interaction of bodies that is very personal."

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